Yep, another bloody remake. This version of the Jesus story, from the director of the much loved Lion, gives it a topical Me Too twist by concluding with the not-a-prostitute-actually Mary, Magdasplaining the true meaning of Jesus's teaching to all the male Apostles, and perhaps very gently rubbing their faces in Him appearing to her first. (Some of them would get their own back when they wrote their tell-all biographies.)

Mary Magdalene is one of those religious films that you are never quite sure is religious or not. Hollywood usually prides itself on giving audiences what they want but whenever religion is involved this principle goes out the window. Even though the films would seem to be aimed at an audience that likes its stories unmucked about with, in recent years they have been given Ridley's gaudy Moses film Exodus, Aronofsky's almost sci-fi abstraction of Noah and now this drab rendering of the New Testament. Mara looks as pretty as an Icon painting in the title role but everything else is dreary and barren. It's like a Malick picture without any pretty images; an outdoor passion play performed in rags on some of the dreariest, dustiest terrain in Southern Italy. A bearded, dishevelled Joaquin Phoenix provides a mumblin' messiah, wrapped up in rags and moving towards a stomach-sucked-in crucifixion. His Jesus doesn't look a great deal different from his hammer-wielding mercenary in last week's You Were Never Really Here.

The first hour or so of the film is a wishy-washy workshoppy act of thespian penitence, all loafing and mumblefish. It tortuously dull but if you make it that far the last third does offer an interesting, perhaps provocative, interpretation of the gospel. Writers from Nikos Kazantzakis to Dan Brown have explored and reexamined the role of Magdalene, but this version is probably most interesting for how it treats Judas (Rahim.) Here he is the most enthusiastic of the apostles, beaming with revolutionary zeal at the prospect of a kingdom of heaven being installed here on Earth. His betrayal is prompted by the realisation that the movement he gave up everything for isn't going to deliver.

Possibly the whole film is about this disenchantment. At the end, all the male apostles have to face their disappointment in discovering that the promises about justice and the overthrow of tyranny they'd assumed were meant literally were actually much more metaphorical and whimsical. The film seems to be intimating that the resulting gospels were them trying to show the world and prove to themselves that they hadn't been duped, following a bearded hobo who might not have been the full shekel.